Savage Epics: The Seminal Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Savage Epics: The Seminal Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I haven’t had this much pure fun reading a book since I was thirteen, which was the same age that I started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’ TARZAN series.

Those TARZAN books that were a turning point for me. I collected, read, and still have the Ballantine series with the Neal Adams and Boris covers. TARZAN led me to the Ace CONAN series that was edited by DeCamp and Carter.

While I still enthusiastically read Robert E. Howard and CONAN, Edgar Rice Burroughs and TARZAN became one of those things I left behind as I entered adulthood. As my passion for reading genre fiction grew, I felt like ERB just wasn’t sophisticated enough for me anymore—too cliché and too archetype-heavy. I felt like Burroughs’ stories were something best left to that kid I used to be. Reading them with an adult’s perspective, I feared, would only taint something I had once so deeply enjoyed.

I’m not sure what prompted me to buy Savage Epics: The Seminal Works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (I also bought the companion book, Cosmic Epics.) Most likely, it was the same thing that got me to pick up that first TARZAN book—Tarzan the Terrible #8—four and a half decades ago: the illustration on the cover.

The tales in Savage Epics—Tarzan of the Apes, At the Earth’s Core, and The Land That Time Forgot—were exactly what I didn’t know I needed.

Sure, there are some problematic elements, and the heroes are too perfect, and the prose might be more overdramatic than purple. However, some of these old-fashioned ways of storytelling are also what make Edgar Rice Burroughs’ works more endearing. Reading Savage Epics is like watching one of those classic black-and-white movies that everyone loves.

And can we justly accuse ERB of being cliché, or his characters of being mere archetypes, when Burroughs was one of the inventors of these types of adventure stories?

ERB wrote some of the most fun adventure tales. If we just put aside our jaded adult minds and embrace our wide-eyed inner child, we can easily believe dinosaurs still live, ancient forgotten cities are hidden in deep, dark jungles, and a strong man with enough wit and courage can thrive in untamed, savage, primal worlds.

Even the head-over-heels, love-at-first-sight romances that always steal the hearts of ERB’s heroes—and make most adults jokingly gag—can, when read with a young person’s heart, remind us of our first crush, and how we knew if we could just win their love, our lives would be complete.